进入英语学习论坛下载音频 去听写专区一展身手

英语学习论坛的“听力练习区”正式与大家见面啦。欢迎大家来这里练习听力，交流经验，共同进步。

本练习区的音频文件选自英语点津的“听中国日报”、“VOA常速”、“流行金曲”及“名人演讲”等栏目，题材丰富，难度各异，适合不同阶段的英语学习者。

英语点津会定期发布音频材料，大家可以在跟帖中贴出自己听写出的音频文字稿。每个音频材料的标准文字稿会在帖子发布两天后公布。

进入该文章的听写练习页面

She loves the taste of blood, hates the sun, and, if you ask, will tell you she died in a train accident back in 1892: Meet Seregon O'Dalley, a would-be vampire living in New York.

She's far from alone. Vampires are in fashion across the United States, encouraged by the hit TV series True Blood, now in its third season, the Twilight movies and Vampire Diaries. Stories about feeding on blood are greedily consumed and eagerly published.

For a pastime with dark, anti-religious overtones vampire fashion is itself becoming oddly like an organized religion. There are rules, priests, private gatherings and large-scale celebrations.

Hundreds of "vampires" attend balls every few months, with the next vampire ball taking place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on Saturday.

Believers in this sect-like lifestyle range from teenage devotees of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight to adults who got hooked on Ann Rice's Vampire Diaries in the 1970s.

Rice is the author credited with turning the European model of vampire - exemplified by Dracula, the horrific character at the center of Bram Stoker's 19th century novel set in Transylvania - into a more user-friendly American version.

In the very un-Transylvanian setting of New Jersey, O'Dalley keeps her apartment well-curtained from the sun and decorates with bat motifs. O'Dalley actually enjoys garlic, the traditional weapon against vampires.

Sociology professor Robert Thomson, who teaches at University of Syracuse in upstate New York, said, "the vampire culture has been around for a long time, long before Twilight and True Blood."

（中国日报网英语点津 Helen 编辑）

About the broadcaster:

Nelly Min is an editor at China Daily with more than 10 years of experience as a newspaper editor and photographer. She has worked at major newspapers in the U.S., including the Los Angeles Times and the Detroit Free Press. She is fluent in Korean and has a 2-year-old son.